Sounds like a model devised by politicians as well not to mention any examples.

Wait what, Hacker News influencers? :D

>>brainwash the population via YouTube,

I like that you think that only one side is doing it. And without clear partner hashtags or sponsorship declarations neither [1].

Seems like an obvious response from OpenAI ngl.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPdmYMHrWKg

The problem that is unique to the AI labs is, how to make people not hate it while continuing to believe it will probably kill all humans in 3-4 years

There are lots of products we know are bad for the world that still sell plenty well. Petroleum products (to include plastic), cigarettes, alcohol, guns, etc.

People generally understand that all of the above are not clear absolute negatives. There are some positives to each. And to LLMs.

> Yes, if the product is seen as bad for the world, it won't sell. But it's pretty bad for people, and I don't know how you'd hide that for the people being harmed.

That's not true. There are all kinds of products that benefit certain people, so sell, but are overall harmful to the world or a harmful to much larger number of people than those who benefit.

> and I don't know how you'd hide that for the people being harmed.

The trick is to make the people being harmed too powerless to stop the harm being done to them. Then your problem is solved and everyone (who matters) is happy.

Debatable.

Many of the vocal critics claiming AI will make us all dumb and is terrible go "I have two Max subscriptions myself.." at some point in the discussion.

The same way Goebbels did fir Nazis

Its not pretty bad for people.

World's best AI models doesn't offset public resentment caused by putting data centers in residential areas, openly buying off the White House and Congress with PAC "donations" and constantly threatening to eliminate everyone's job.

Exactly. If you need a PR campaign to convince people you're the good guy…

This is the mistake they made. Anthropic and OpenAI are great technically. I love them. But they are absolute crap at making most people feeling like its relevant to them or that AI companies care about them. So its' really easy to be dismissive of the tech and oppose things like data centers. I think the influencer route is a quick fix. They need to appeal to everyday problems but, understandably, the founders like Dario and Altman think very high level. They think they are doing what's best in a way, but not in a way that's relateable to most people. LLMs need to be more human friendly; example, solve little problems like actually writing without sounding like AI

They're buying the credibility of the influencers.

Influencers have the greatest influence on their audience, especially repeat viewers who follow or subscribe to them. You need to establish credibility with an audience before you're worth anything to the marketers. This takes time to build.

OpenAI's hypothetical robot influencers have no audience.

They don't even have a video model

Turns out, people are a lot better at detecting slop than expected. An uncanny slop valley.

I see no reason why they can’t target both at the same time. Personally I know two people who never would’ve paid for ChatGPT a year ago but now do so. I think for the average person it’s going to be a slow and difficult conversion process to paying customers.

DuPont advertises

I get the sentiment but it feels like this right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwcJNsoY50E

> It is weird how prominent anti-AI sentiment is online and in media. It's by far the most popular and fastest growing technology in the world. So presumably people have a general favorable impression of the technology as they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it

It is popular because it’s useful but people still have unfavorable attitudes towards it in polls. It’s like Amazon. We use Amazon cuz it’s convenient but do we like the way Bezos treats his employees?

> put 'good for the world' in quotes because obviously it's not

It's in quotes because it appears to be an specific phrase used by a campaign pitch (supposedly).

It's different from normal advertising of a commercial product which obviously will call their product "good", but "good for the world" implies something deeper.

It’s being jammed into products where it’s not wanted. I use AI every day with good results, but I do not want it in my browser, my OS, my text editor, or AI summaries in my search engine. I want it in a separate web app where I can use it or not.

So am I pro- or anti- AI? Both. It depends what it is.

Thank you for your service, your influencer token stipend has been applied to your account.

> So presumably people have a general favorable impression of the technology as they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it.

That's not implied by engagement. It's possible to use the advantage AI gives you in a competitive landscape while still fearing the future it will bring.

> The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?

It was discussed a while ago on HN, with a more well known source, that I cannot find right now, but on a quick DDG search this is a quick article I could conjure.

https://www.gate.com/news/detail/david-sacks-warns-ai-doom-n...

> It's by far the most popular and fastest growing technology in the world. So presumably people have a general favorable impression of the technology as they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it.

This in itself is not an argument. British Opium was selling like hotcakes in China, so surely people people must have had a general favorable impression if they're engaging with the product and many are paying for it?

> The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?

Give you a hint: starts with C, ends with a P, with a C in the middle

Lol, yes, slop is growing exponentially.

> The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?

It may be a difficult concept for an astroturfer to understand, but people are activists for free. If you have found any anti-AI financiers, please share them so I can apply. Of course you already know there are none.

> The big question is who is funding the influencer army to gaslight people into thinking AI/data centers will somehow end the world?

The companies are doing this themselves in a (stupid) attempt to do regulatory capture/ set up a cartel. Dario Amodei recently published an essay pushing this idea.

> And I don't buy that it's being jammed down the throats by most employers. Sometimes maybe, but I see the reverse, where people WANT to use frontier models and are being prevented through archaic security hoops.

What is N here? 1?

> It is weird how prominent anti-AI sentiment is online and in media. It's by far the most popular and fastest growing technology in the world.

Is it though? Do we actually know that? Is it growing faster than facebook did or google search? Is it even possible to measure when some of the "adoption" is probably people triggering it incidentally (e.g. AI mode in google search shouldn't count as adoption here).

People are worried about it because it is a highly disruptive technology with unproven ROI for businesses as of yet (restricting claims to LLMs here). It has a lot of negative potential side effects for many different groups of people. The media is reflecting these viewpoints. If there's any astroturfing going on, it's from the pro LLM camp.

My friend, there's constantly a big push against all AI/LLM companies right now (rightly so, IMO, but I digress). What you're claiming to see in those threads can be found in nearly every thread about every company in the space.

Edit: FWIW, searching "general drumbeat" on HN only brings up your comment. Is that quote accurate?

they have marketing budgets that top cocacola and pepsi combined.

>could even be part of the same organisation's campaign

Eh we know its part of the same campaigns. "Please provide us with regulatory capture because our tech is an existential threat" has been going on for a while now.

the boomer news have been turning the ai doom scenario to 11 for that pre ipo ramp up

I feel like the "We hacked hugging face" thing and this influencer thing are targeting different things but have the same goal of hyping up the company for the IPO.

- The HF incident was to get the attention of investors and convey the message: "we have this incredibly powerful technology, imagine where we will be in 5 years"

- With this influencer campaign it's just a drive to get more people to use ChatGPT / sign up to ChatGPT so when IPO time comes, they can show strong user growth.

Over the past few months I've seen various reports that OpenAI's financial position isn't great and if those reports have any merit, then likely the higher ups at OpenAI are panicking that they might become a WeWork 2.0. Everything they are doing now is an attempt to justify their $1T valuation to investors during the IPO.

I think it’s more that YC is so heavily invested in AI-related stuff it cannot then have a message board affiliated with it that has anti-AI content on it. Maybe it has always been like this for anything YC had its fingers in and it was just less obvious?

Yeah, that post disappeared rather quickly. I was surprised by it.

She's in prison because she defrauded enterprise customers. If she went B2C, she'd probably be head of the FTC by now.

Success stories vs. horror stories.

It would make for an interesting matchup.

Could you share more about this?